Rosalind Polly Blakesley

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237 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 23 Jul

Rosalind Polly Blakesley’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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In Our Time · Vigée Le Brun · 23 Jul 2026 podcast

So she goes off through Lithuania.

She goes through Courland, up the coast of Estonia.

Beautiful, beautiful journey.

And she gets to St.

Petersburg.

According to her memoirs, and we may come back to those because they are not reliable, but according to her memoirs,

She meets Catherine the Great within a couple of days and there's a very courteous exchange and the Empress is very flattering to her.

And she lands this great commission, which is to portray two of Catherine's granddaughters.

So the older two daughters of Paul, Catherine the Great's son.

And she produces a portrait and she's very pleased with it.

But things don't go that well because the Empress really takes against it.

And she says of this portrait, she says, my two granddaughters look like two pug dogs basking in the sun in one of her letters.

And in another one, she says, they're like monkeys grimacing.

And she says, people don't know which one's the older and which one's the younger.

Well, the thing is, we don't have the first painting.

But therein lies a tale because Vigée in her memoirs, A, she claims that this isn't the Empress's response at all.

It's actually that of her latest lover, a man called Platon Zubov.

And she says it's all his fault.

He didn't like it.

And actually, the Empress really did like it.

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